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Wed, 04 Mar 2015 01:37:57 +0100MYOBen-gbGartner has another death of the PC momenthttp://www.fudzilla.com/news/notebooks/35487-gartner-has-another-death-of-the-pc-moment
http://www.fudzilla.com/news/notebooks/35487-gartner-has-another-death-of-the-pc-moment

This time they will be killed by Chromebooks

Now that the PC market is climbing out of recession, beancounters working for Gartner are predicting that Chromebooks are going to put it back there.

This year, Gartner estimates that total Chromebook sales will hit 5.2 million, which is up 79 per cent from 2013. Looking further out to 2017, the number of units shifted should reach 14.4 million, in other words we're looking at a near tripling of sales inside three years. Gartner seems to think that Chromebooks are going to be super-important in the business world.

Isabelle Durand, principal analyst at Gartner, admits that so far, businesses have looked at Chromebooks, but not bought many. But by adopting Chromebooks and cloud computing, businesses can benefit; they can shift their focus from managing devices to managing something much more important their data.

Chromebooks have been doing well in the education sector where they fix the problem of tablets not having keyboards. In 2013, the education sector was responsible for almost 85 per cent of Chromebook sales. This will all be worrying for Apple which is obviously not interested in Chromebooks or anything like it and has given the market to Samsung. Samsung has 65 per cent of the market, and Acer snaffling much of the rest at 21 per cent. HP and Lenovo were in a practical dead-heat for third place at 6.8 and 6.7 per cent respectively, with Dell trailing on at 0.3 per cent.

It seems that while tablets and smartphones were going to kill off the PC and didn’t, now the analysts money is on the Chromebook and cloud combo.

Research firm IDC reports that worldwide PC shipments totalled 73.4 million units in the first quarter of the year. This is a 4.4% decline compared to Q1 2013, but there were still some winners (and losers of course).

Lenovo is still in the lead, but HP isn’t far behind. Lenovo shipped 12.9 million PCs last quarter, while HP came in a close second with 12.5 million. Dell ranked third with 9.8 million. Acer and Asus are in fourth and fifth place with 4.9 and 4.3 million units respectively. Smaller vendors accounted for 39.2 percent of all shipments.

While the numbers are still bad, they are not as bad IDC originally projected. IDC was expecting a 5.3% decline. What’s more, Gartner thinks shipments only fell 1.7% and totalled 76.6 million rather than 73.4 million.

The US market was stagnant, contracting 0.6% in the first quarter. IDC said EMEA outperformed its expectations. The same is true of Japan, which saw “sizable growth.” The land of the rising sun gobbled up 7% of all PCs shipped in Q1, the biggest slice of the market since 2006.

The Asia-Pacific region is still struggling with lacklustre demand and inventory remains high.

"PC shipment growth in the United States remained slightly faster than most other regions in the first quarter. However, the passing boost from XP replacements, constrained consumer demand, and no clear driver of a market rebound are expected to keep growth below zero going forward," said Rajani Singh, Senior Research Analyst, Personal Computing. "A rebound in consumer or a continuation of accelerated commercial upgrades could boost growth slightly, but low demand for upgrades in general combined with competition from tablets and 2-in-1 systems limit the growth potential."

It appears that the demise of Windows XP helped vendors boost shipments and beat forecasts. It is difficult to say whether the XP transition will have a significant impact on sales moving forward. Many organisations that planned to upgrade already did it in Q1, but there may be quite a few stragglers, especially among individual users and SMBs.

According to a new report from Gartner, the worldwide PC industry shrank 8.6 percent over the last quarter. It’s just more bad news in what has already turned out to be the worst year for the PC industry in history.

Worldwide shipments were just 80.3 million units in Q3, marking the worst quarter since the economic calamity of 2008. Lenovo still reigns supreme with a 17.6 percent market share, but HP is not far behind with a 17.1 percent share. Dell came in third with 11.6 percent of the market, while Acer and Asus seized 8.3 and 6.1.

Both Acer and Asus saw their market share drop by more than 22 percent compared to the third quarter of 2012. There’s some good news, too. Sales in the US were actually 3.5 percent higher than last year, but then again EMEA saw a massive 13.7 percent slide.

Gartner has warned that worldwide wafer fab equipment (WFE) spending is on pace to total $31.4 billion in 2012, a decline of 13.3 percent from 2011 spending of $36.2 billion.

Big G warns that while the market will improve in 2013, it will not return to positive growth, with WFE spending projected to total $31.2 billion, a 0.8 percent decline from 2012. Things will not get better until 2014 and when the market returns to growth, as it is projected to increase 15.3 percent to surpass $35.9 billion.

Bob Johnson, research vice president at Gartner said that the outlook for semiconductor equipment markets has deteriorated as the macro economy has weakened. "WFE started off the year strong, as foundries and other logic manufacturers ramped up sub-30-nm (nanometer) production.

However, demand for new equipment logic production will soften as yields improve, leading to declining shipment volumes for the rest of the year," Johnson said. Wafer fab manufacturing capacity use will decline into the low 80 percent range by the end of 2012 before slowly increasing to about 87 percent by the end of 2013, he added.

Johnson said that although a period of inventory correction, which led to lowered production levels, appears to be over, overall market weakness is continuing to depress use level. "Increased demand, combined with less than mature yields at the leading edge, is creating shortages at the leading edge for logic, but that is not enough to bring total utilization levels up to desired levels. In the memory segment, some suppliers are even cutting production in an attempt to shore up weak market fundamentals," he said.

Memory sales will continue to be weak through 2012, with strong declines in DRAM investments and a virtually flat NAND market.

Research firm Gartner slashed its growth forecast for the global PC market this year to 3.8 percent from 9.3 percent. While the tame Apple Press is claiming it is because of the tablet, Gartner says that it is mostly slower economies in Western Europe and the United States.

The long-hoped for recovery in the corporate and government PC replacement cycle has been derailed by the U.S. and European debt crises and associated fallout, Gartner said. Ranjit Atwal, research director at Gartner, said that an increasingly pessimistic economic outlook is causing consumer and business sentiment to deteriorate in both regions."

Gartner said it expects consumer spending to tighten in response, while business spending would also tighten but to a lesser degree. "U.S. consumer PC shipments were much weaker than expected in the second quarter, and indications are that back-to-school PC sales are disappointing" Atwal said.

Insecurity experts should stop banging on about where data is located in cloud computing models, according to Google. Chief security officer for Google Apps, Eran Feigenbaum, told SC Magazine Australia that everyone is wasting time being concerned about data sovereignty in outsourced environments.

Eran "Raven" Feigenbaum said that it was an old way of thinking. Real security experts should worry about security and privacy of data, rather than where it is stored.

Security professionals are getting increasingly rattled by global cloud models where corporate data could be seized by law enforcement. Gartner analyst Andrew Walls warned that punters has little control over what happens to outsourced data once it goes onto the cloud.

Since Google does not give a physical inspection of their data centres, the only thing that users have is a contract. The standard contract has plenty of get out of jail cards.

It is starting to look like the Tablet thing will be an Apple only affair, according to analysts Gartner.

Big G said that mounting competition will see Apple's share of the touchscreen tablet market decline but the iPad will still make up nearly half of all tablets sold in 2015. The iPad will account for 47 percent of worldwide sales of 294.3 million tablets in 2015, down from 63.5 percent of 108.2 million units to be sold in 2012 and 68.7 percent of 69.7 million tablets to be sold this year. This year Apple has 83.9 percent of the total 17.6 million tablets sold in 2010.

Google's Android operating system will see its market share rise steadily from 14.2 percent last year, to 19.9 percent this year, to 24.4 percent in 2012 and 38.6 percent in 2015. You can forget all about RIM, which will have opnly 10 per cent by 2015 but Gartner was optimistic about HP's WebOS operating system acquired from Palm. WebOS tablets will have 4.0 percent of the market by the end of 2011, 3.9 percent by 2012 and 3.0 percent by 2015.

Gartner seemed to have forgotten all about Microsoft. The risk is that the tablet thing is entirely an Apple fad, in which case it will disappear if punters get bored. Rather than be a game changer that could mean that the iPad becomes a technology dead end.

Analyst outfit Gartner has made the claim that PCs are dying and we will all be trying to write our novels on Apple tablets.

While such a prophecy is more terrifying that anything Daniel or St John could come up with, it is exactly the vision of St Steve Jobs. The market research firm said that tablets will not be "additive"but subtractive and instead of opting for that second PC and then maybe a tablet on top of that, consumers will opt for just the tablet.

George Shiffler, research director at Gartner said expects growing consumer enthusiasm for mobile PC alternatives, such as the iPad and other media tablets, to dramatically slow home mobile PC sales. "We once thought that mobile PC growth would continue to be sustained by consumers buying second and third mobile PCs as personal devices. However, we now believe that consumers are not only likely to forgo additional mobile PC buys but are also likely to extend the lifetimes of the mobile PCs they retain as they adopt media tablets and other mobile PC alternatives as their primary mobile device." This means that instead of buying a PC they will use the cash to buy a tablet or other mobile device or smartphone.

Gartner expects home mobile PCs to average less than 10 percent annual growth in mature markets from 2011 through 2015." It is also lowering its PC unit forecast for 2011 and 2012. Mobile PCs are fast dropping out of date. They are too heavy and and do not offer the all-day battery life, to substantiate their promise of real mobility. While that might be true, we do not think it is time to write off anything yet.

Tablets and smartphones are no where near capable of doing the things that a PC can do within the consumer market. Tablets are not good for typing out long emails, documents or books. Plugging in a keyboard negates the purpose of a tablet, if there is one. Smartphones are too small to do much else other than casually browse and send messages. Netbooks are impossible to type more than a sentence on before becoming frustrated.

Perhaps the development of PC TV's might be the factor that kills off the large scale adoption of the PC, but the tablet? Please!

The PC market is being gutted as consumers lose interest and shift to tablets and games consoles, according to the research outfit Gartner. Big G said that worldwide PC shipments, which do not include sales of tablet computers, totalled 93.5 million units in the fourth quarter, up 3.1 per cent from a year ago but lower than the 4.8 per cent growth forecast previously.

Gartner analyst Mikako Kitagawa said that holiday PC sales were weak as punters rushed to spend their dosh on media tablets and other consumer electronic devices, such as game consoles. What is saving the PC market during the fourth quarter as a steady growth in the professional market driven by replacement purchases.

Last year the PC market recovered from the recession, as it returned to double-digit growth, compared to low single-digit growth in 2009, she said. Gartner said worldwide PC shipments totaled 350.9 million units in 2010, up 13.8 per cent over last year.

The maker of expensive printer ink HP held on to the top position in worldwide PC sales, HP has an 18.8 per cent share of the market followed by Acer with 12.7 per cent and Dell with 11.6 per cent. Lenovo holds 10.1-per cent market share followed by Toshiba with 5.7 per cent. It was a good year for Lenovo and Toshiba. Lenovo's worldwide market share grew by 21.4 per cent while Toshiba's was up 12.1 per cent.

What is being seen is that the days of a grey box in the corner of everyone's home might be numbered. She said that while the new gadgets to not replace primary PCs, but they are viewed as good enough devices for these who want to have a second and third connected device for content consumption usage. It was mini-notebook shipments were hit the most by the success of media tablets, Kitagawa said.

It is starting to look like Apple will become the minority OS of phones and adopt the same role it has in the PC market. According to beancounters at Gartner, Apple is fast losing ground to Android.

Android will completely wipe out Apple's iPhone operating system by 2014 after passing it this year. It means that it does not matter how many phones Apple will ship, how many fanboys scream that it is a cure for cancer, ultimately the business model is doomed.

Looking at the figures it seems that Gartner is predicting that Apple will be doing its best to hold its market share at 14 per cent a figure that Android over took this week. At the moment the market leader is still Symbian and much of Android's gains are going to be made at that operating system's expense.

It is bad news for Microsoft, as Gartner predicts that it will not even make a dent in the Mobile market. It's important to note that while Gartner's figures do not predict the iPhone will be crushed, it will simply never get any bigger than it is now.